IN 1983 IN BARZAN, a small Kurdish village in Northern Iraq, Saddam
Hussein arrested every male over the age of 12. “They disappeared and
have never been found again,” says Seattle Pacific University Assistant
Professor of English Kimberly Segall. So how does a community function,
even move on, in the wake of such brutality?

Segall’s new research, to
be published by Duke University Press later this year, explores that
question. “I interviewed Kurdish refugees and became intrigued with the
ways in which cultural groups work out their traumatic experiences,” she
says.

Her curiosity took root while spending two years in Iraq teaching
English as a Second Language and delivering humanitarian aid to the
Kurdish people. She began to wonder, “After years of being terrorized, how do
people recover? How do they work through the horror of the past? How
do they find their sense of identity when they’re always afraid of being
killed, or they’re always running?”

Then she noticed that one of her Iraqi
friends, who had survived torture and the effects of chemical weapons,
would sing and dance with his community as a way to deal with grief. “I
was so impressed by this, because you would think that when people are
completely downtrodden their voices would be silenced, that their artistic
forms would cease.” Instead, says Segall, it was art forms that kept
the people’s hope alive.

“When people are traumatized, it distorts and
disrupts their current moment,” she says, noting that such trauma in
Iraq goes far beyond the reach of one dictator but represents tensions
between groups such as the Iraqi Shiites and Kurds over disputed lands
in Kirkuk. “But through song and other art forms, you’re acting out the
past, dancing and interacting with people. You’re not alone suffering
from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Segall says she still feels a desire
to return to Iraq, to be on the “front line.” “But what I do at SPU is
equally important, because the misunderstandings about Middle Eastern
cultures are so great.”

Several of Segall’s students have been deployed
to Iraq over the past year for military service. “I want to give all
my students a gift as a teacher,” she explains. “I want to give them
a sense of understanding about the history and culture of the Iraqi people.”

The
recent war, says Segall, has brought new suffering to the country.
Even more reason, she says, to see art as one possible avenue for healing. “Post-war
Iraq needs to incorporate the opportunity for people to recognize historical
changes with rituals and artistic forms. If healing doesn’t happen, Iraq
will always have the potential for violence.”

So the widows of Barzan
sing, dance and tell stories. “They sing songs of grief and lament, and
of a wistful wonder whether their husbands and sons are still alive,” says
Segall. “This is what gets them through. It helps to confirm that the
past is over.”